Great River Energy to Exit Coal

Member News

Minnesota's Great River Energy last Thursday announced a plan to significantly reduce its carbon footprint by replacing a North Dakota coal plant with renewable energy projects, market purchases and grid-scale battery technology. The plan calls for retiring the 1,151 MW Coal Creek Station in the second half of 2022, and the addition of 1,100 MW of wind energy purchases by the end of 2023.

A new report called Our Sustainability Story: Customers at the Center published by the Ameren Corporation details the actions the company has taken toward environmental, social and governance issues. The company has invested in rate-regulated energy infrastructure to improve reliability while keeping electric rates more stable. Thanks to efficiency upgrades and programs, Ameren estimates its customers have saved around $1.4 billion since 2010. They have also benefited, in several regions, from either largely unchanged rates or rate reductions.

Customer Information Systems are the central nervous system for the customer line of business within utilities. They are heavily integrated and complex systems centered around the utility meter to cash process and act as the cash register for utilities. Utility customer organizations, however, are being asked to substantially improve engagement and the customer experience. To do that, they need to offer more than a cash register. As utilities continue to invest in improving customer engagement, a new area of innovation is sprouting.

You’ve identified a bill-pay problem, spoken to customers in need, determined a solution to help, approved a budget, put plans into action, hired a team of web designers to create beautiful landing pages, and now your awesome program is built. Hooray! Now all you need are a few folks to sign up and it’s off to the races. Right? Kind of... Or, you’ve managed a financial assistance program that’s been around for decades, helping hundreds, or even thousands, of people over the years to maintain economic stability. Well done!

Industry News

Not all energy efficiency savings are created equal. The traditional goals of energy efficiency have been to save money, improve health and reduce environmental impacts. Historically, the way to achieve this goal was simple: reduce the amount of electricity and gas consumed in buildings, across the board. Now, as the electric grid has gotten cleaner, achieving these three goals requires new approaches.

Form Energy, the stealthy, Bill Gates-backed startup, has secured its first utility deal for a novel super-long-duration energy storage technology. And its stated capability blows away anything else on the market. A cadre of storage industry veterans and MIT scientists started Form Energy in late 2017 to tackle one of the hardest problems in clean energy: how to make renewable power available whenever it's needed. In the early days, founder and former Tesla storage leader Mateo Jaramillo described the deployment as a "decade-long project."

Armed with her cellphone, Ellen Biales spent an hour last month transmitting video of her St. Paul home to an energy expert who asked questions and dispensed advice. Biales was among the first Minnesotans to receive a virtual Home Energy Squad visit from the Center for Energy and Environment. The service usually reached more than 700 customers a month before COVID-19 temporarily closed business. Homeowners sign up online and fill out a pre-visit questionnaire for a free visit from two Home Energy Squad staffers.

Utility group PacifiCorp is about to open a gusher of opportunity for wind, solar and energy storage developers in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain regions. Last year PacifiCorp finalized a landmark integrated resource plan that for the first time envisions it relying on large amounts of wind farms and solar backed by energy storage to meet its long-range energy needs. Now the utility, part of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, is preparing a solicitation for projects to meet that plan’s needs through 2024, taking a concrete step toward its vision.

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SECC is a nonprofit organization that works to learn the wants and needs of energy consumers in North America, encourages the collaborative sharing of best practices in consumer engagement among industry stakeholders, and educates the public about the benefits of smart energy technology.